The sound subsystem had not been crippled.
Creating ACLs (“access control lists”) for files/directories was broken, so the logged in user couldn’t get permissions to access the sound card (and other things).
But yes, I agree, this should have been caught during testing.
Although each update is available for public testing in the update-test repo for at least a week, kernel updates even longer normally (this time not because of an important security fix).
And once again, nobody reported a problem during this time (apparently no users bother to test), so the update got released with this bug.
openSUSE is a community distribution, and needs the help of community members to even be possible.
And that includes all of us.